I'm John Batchel with Daisy Dunn, her new book, The Missing Thread, a Women's History of the Ancient World.

Daisy is a classicist. She has the Greek. She has Latin. My understanding is she's going to conquer linear A and she has linear B, all these languages.

We're going past the

Minoans, although that's a wonderful chapter, the Minoans favored cosmetics. Others favored

cosmetics, too. We're now going to a part of the story that is well known if I say it takes

place on the island of Lesbos. It's also well known if I say it takes place through the person of Sappho, the poetess.

However, what it was not well known to me is that of the reputation of Lesbos,

it was that it was women, beautiful women everywhere, the beauties of Lesbos, except Saffo was said to be short and

dark. Was she considered homely, Daisy? She is very unfair. I have to say on poor Saffo,

because we don't have any representations to be able to judge what she actually looked like.

Most of the people who have described her as being very unattractive and short and dark,

as you say, are people living hundreds of years after she survived,

so they could not possibly have seen her.

But the thing with Sappho is that because she comes to Miss Island,

which in the 7th century BC when she was living, had long been established as a place where beautiful women resided.

Because she wasn't known for her beauty. She was known for something else. I think that kind of gave rise to this rumor that, okay, she was a poet because she wasn't one of the winners of one of the great beauty contests that was being held there.

She wrote or she wrote, or she composed and she performed instead.

Sappho was inheriting a tradition that was longstanding poetry.

And she invented something called the sapphic stanza, which is quite different than hexameter. I'm unused to it. But at the same time,

she was part of a political turmoil. Her brothers were part of a political turmoil. My telene was

Sappho City, and it was involved. This is on the coast of what we now call Turkey in the Helene world.

Sappho was involved through her brothers in two different cities,

...